Who is behind HANDI?

HANDI was the idea of Louise Wilson a Health Informatician working for the NHS in Newcastle. Louise had worked on the development of an App for ME and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome ActiveME and realised what a challenge it could be building and app for the first time (particularly with the special challenges in the health and care domain). In her past Lou had managed the EMIS National User Group - The independent user group for GPs using the market leading GP Computer system EMIS. From her experience Lou understood the power of group collaboration and wanted to bring it to bear in the world of health and care apps.

Louise approached Ewan Davis now an independent consultant with 30 years experience in Health Informatics. Ewan was Treasurer of the British Computer Society Heath Group a past Chairman of its Primary Health Care Specialist Group and a past Chairman of the Intellect Healthcare Group (The industry trade association) He too understood the power of group collaboration and agreed to work with Louise to create HANDI. Ewan recruited his daughter, Iona, a final year design student at Chelsea College of Art and Rob Dyke a young entrepreneur working with open source and apps in health and care to respectively provide marketing and design and technical and business support.

These four founders are the Directors of HANDIhealth CIC and are supported by an Executive Board who are responsible for setting and implementing HANDI's Strategy.

Sarah Amani

Sarah has a long experience in working with multi-agency teams with adults, children and families as a mental health clinician and manager. Her core skills are underpinned by her experience of working as a mental health nurse in public health services for the past 8 years. She has a track record of developing groups into highly successful and innovative teams. Sarah's varied experiences enable her to work collaboratively and effectively with individuals, teams and organisations from various sectors and fields.

She led her team to win the highly commended Health Service Journal's Innovation in Mental Health Award in 2011. She also led her team to win the Department of Health Mary Seacole Leadership Award in 2011. Sarah collaborated with people who use mental health services to come up with the idea for the first UK Early Intervention in Psychosis App - this was voted as 7th out of a 500 submitted ideas in the Department of Health 'maps and apps' crowd sourcing project.

Dr Eunice Bamgboye

Eunice has a PhD in Informatics (Computation) in multi-agency environments and has worked as an independent contractor for the NHS over the past six years in various multi-disciplinary system development projects to develop and improve clinical services and commissioning delivery. Prior to this she was involved with working within partnerships between the NHS and other agencies to support the multi-disciplinary approach to improving services. Eunice is currently the director of Innovative Consultancy Solutions (ICS) where she continues to provide consultancy for service improvement for various work sectors.

Tim Benson

Tim has spent his career in health informatics and contributed to interoperability standards, clinical terminology, consent management and outcomes monitoring. He is interoperability architect for the Wellcome Trust’s Sintero Project, which has developed an XDS platform for shared care; he leads the TSB miConsent (patient-controlled consent management) project and is a partner in the TSB CommComm project (eCommissioning Community to support GP consortia). He is author "Principles of Health Interoperability HL7 and SNOMED", which, rather surprisingly given the title, has been a best-seller in USA. He has developed an iPhone app for monitoring patient-reported outcomes (howRU).

Ewan is a Director of Woodcote Consulting and has worked in healthcare IT since 1981. He was founder and CEO of leading GP supplier AAH Meditel for 12 years. He was Treasurer of the British Computer Society Health Group and a past Chairman of both the BCS Primary Health Care Group and the Intellect Health Care Group and is currently a member of the Intellect Health Care Council. He has unrivaled connections across Government, academia, the NHS and Industry in UK health informatics.

Ewan is excited by the potential apps to help transform health and care and is one of the founders of HANDI Health.

Iona Davis

Iona was a final year graphic design student and Chelsea College of Art and provided support to HANDI as part of her final year project. Iona now works for eHealth Insider, but continues to provide design and marketing input into HANDI in her spare time.

Ian was for many years a Glasgow GP and is now a Director of the Board of the openEHR Foundation, an Honorary Senior Research Associate with CHIME, UCL and the founder/director of freshEHR Clinical Informatics Ltd. He is a member of the NHS Scotland SCIMP Working Group and an active member of the BCS Primary Health Care Specialist Group.

Louise Wilson

Louise works for the NHS Northern CFS/ME Clinical Network and came up with this idea following her experiences producing the ActiveME app for people with chronic fatigue syndrome and ME.

Lou has worked in Healthcare IT for 20 years including time at the Sowerby Centre for Health Informatics at the University of Newcastle, the NHS Information Authority and for 4 years was the Group Manager for the EMIS National User Group giving her invaluable experience of running a community interest organisation.

[…] We are a group of clinicians, developers, health informaticians and others who believe that lightweight healthcare apps for patients, carers and health and care professionals provide the key to enabling IT to transform of health and care. […]

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